I’m playing live tonight at Tresor. It’s one of the more well known clubs in Berlin. On stage tonight I will be keeping a secret from the audience. Don’t tell anyone ok? The secret is I will have a cheat sheet with on it lyrics in front of me. In fact, I will play a song tonight where as I sit here right now typing this I can’t even remember the opening line! My lyric cheat sheet won’t be on a Textedit or Word document. It’s built right into Ableton Live. Remember when you first opened Live there are those Lessons that pop up on the right part of the interface? If you forgot about them and want to see them again just open Live and under the View menu choose Lessons. See them now? Let’s hack these Lessons and get our own text in there. Here’s how to do it:

Create and save a Project (song) in which you would like to have some of your own text in the Lesson area. Next, find the Project folder that was created when you saved your song. Inside that folder create a new folder with the exact same name as your Project followed by the word “Lessons”. Inside this folder create a plain text document and name it LessonsEN.txt

I use TextWrangler (free!) but you can use the plain old Mac TextEdit too. Type your lyrics or whatever reminders and notes you need. You can create separate pages by using the following syntax:

$Page Name of Song

If you add a: / before text it makes the text italic and bold. I like to make most of my text like this because it’s easier to read. Save the LessonsEN.txt and open Ableton and your Project to see your lyrics. Click on the screenshots in this post to view them larger.

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20 Comments

I do something similar to this when I’m writing. in the MASTER TRACK, I’ll edit the info text to put reminders such as key, chord structures of each section, and lyric ideas. It’s quicker, but not nearly as pretty, or easy to read as this. :)

thats a great tip to use for notes on a song – the notes window in the bottom left is too small – my sound notes usually consists of lots of txt files on my desktop with names which are to-do’s e.g.: ‘TRY TO MAKE KICK HEAVIER.txt’ etc eheh

No don’t worry no offense taken. In fact, calling me out on bad grammar is good… pain teaches! I’ve made the “you’re” mistake on this blog before and was called out for it before too. I pretty much have learned everything I know the hard way!

Funny, I just got notification of this post as I am typing out the lyrics to songs in my current live set. Thanks so much for this post, I’m totally doing this!
BTW,sSince we are talking grammar (and I teach high school English), “Crashing there minds” should be “Crashing their minds.” Lol… The way I teach my students to differentiate between “their” and “there” is that “there,” which indicates location, has the word “here” in it. The same trick works for “Where.”
Much respect and thanks!